The rise of the super-app: GO-JEK eyes payments and services domination

GO-JEK is known as a super app on its home turf of Indonesia, where users can obtain anything from medicine to a massage right to their doorstep.

What’s less known, however, is that this super app is only one within a “constellation of super apps”, as Aldi Haryopratomo, CEO of GO-PAY, termed it recently at an event in Singapore.

“From the very beginning, we were trying to solve a holistic consumer problem: the user problem, the driver problem,” he explained at the Money 20/20 Asia conference why there are separate super apps, too, for the GO-JEK drivers as well as the merchant partners they work with.

As the country’s largest mobile on-demand service platform with a gross transaction value (GTV) of over US$9m across all markets including Vietnam, Thailand and Singapore (its launch in the Philippines is imminent), this approach appears to be paying off.

“This approach of going deep and building the ecosystem in one market, propagating it in others, and taking what we learn from other markets [to heart], is really what is going to help us scale not only in Indonesia but across the region,” he said.